My Second Triathlon - Bonney Lake Sprint - I brought home more hardware!

So last Wednesday night I decided I would sign up for my second triathlon, the Bonney Lake Sprint. This would be exactly a week from my very first triathlon (I might have a new addiction). It wasn't the best day for a tri but I will say the rain is a lot better than scorching heat!

The Swim (1/3 mile): Before the start of the race I decided to get into the water and warm up. The water was actually warmer than standing around so that was nice. During the start of the first wave, I was standing next to a guy, Fola, and he was shivering and not in a wetsuit. We started chatting and it was his very first open water swim and he was asking me advise on how to swim straight to the buoys. I found out that he swam in college and he was doing a relay for this race. Fola was in the second wave and I was in the third. The swim felt good but the last buoy we were to go around drifted and since I'm a rule follower I went towards where the buoy drifted to and noticed a little too late that everybody else had just cut off that distance and swam into the swim finish...so I lost a little bit of time. Oh well, still came in 8th overall in the swim with a time of 8:43.1.

T1: Talk about a weird transition! We ran out of the water up a boat ramp, then had to rung along the sidewalk, cross a street controlled by police and into a park then into our transition area. When I got to my bike Fola's team was on the same rack I was so I got to say hello to Fola as I got ready for my bike ride. My time for the first transition was 1:36.2.

The Bike (12.2 miles): I was not expecting the bike course to be so horrible. There were multiple hills which made your legs just BURN! At one point I looked down at my bike computer and it said I had only been riding for 7 minutes and this is the point I knew it was going to be a LONG ride. The one good thing about hills is at some point you get to go downhill! There was one downhill where I knew my speed was getting up there and I tried not looking at my speed but gave in and I saw 36 mph! That was a little freaky even though I know bicyclists go a lot faster than that. Patty and Bill were on the bike course cheering on the RTB team and taking pictures. Its always great to hear the cheers from them especially after coming up a hill! I came in 33rd overall in the bike with a time of 40:22.3 with an average of 18.3 mph (with the hills this was shocking!).

These are the only smiles available on this bike course - they were caused by Patty and Bill


T2: This transition was a little bit of a blur. I could hear Suzie and Toby cheering for me :o) My second transition time was 0:41.9!

The Run (5k/3.1 miles): My legs were extremely tired after the hilly bike ride and I had heard rumors that the run course was a little hilly. After I got out of transition, Suzie, Toby and the boys were there cheering. Toby ran ahead and met up with me and gave me some great words of encouragement. So about 1/2 mile into the run I met the first hill. This hill was steeper than I expected any hill to be on the course but it wasn't that long. The guy in front of me stopped to walk it and I passed him. After this hill I knew I was going to be lucky if this run was any faster than 10 minute miles. There were no mile markers on the course so I wasn't sure what my pace was. In a way this was nice because then I was able to focus on just running all the killer hills instead of worrying about pace. I am finding that once I get past the water stations on these runs I feel warmed up and a lot stronger. On the last hill a golden retriever joined the runners. The dog found it very entertaining to run along side us but it was a little obnoxious. I tore it up on the final stretch. I passed a couple guys that I had my eyes on for about 1 mile and the cheering from the RTBers on the sidelines gave me the rush to push it to my max across the finish line. Surprisingly I finished in 27:37.6 (8:55 min mile pace) and overall 60th. After seeing this split I felt good about the run taking all the hills into consideration!

This is a face of "BRING IT ON!" (or "Please no more hills!")



Final Stats:
Overall Time: 1:19:01.1
Overall Place: 25th out of 172
Division Place: 1st!



After the race I met up with Fola and his relay team. They were all pretty cool. Found out Fola was from Nigeria and his fastest 100yd freestyle was 44 seconds! We chatted for a long time. Hopefully we'll meet again at another triathlon. He was pretty cool.

Fola and his team - 2nd place relay team